SPORTS OF THE TIMES

SPORTS OF THE TIMES; San Diego's Super Roots

By Dave Anderson

Published: January 25, 1988

ONCE it was known as a sleepy Navy town near the Mexican border, the best place in California to get a tattoo. But now San Diego awaits the circus maximus of sports, Super Bowl week. And when the thousands of visitors depart after the Denver Broncos and the Washington Redskins determine the Super Bowl XXII champion Sunday, an estimated $140 million will have been spent during the circus max in this sparkling harbor city that the American Football League discovered.

San Diego is where Sid Gillman fine-tuned the pro passing game, where Lance Alworth (alias Bambi) bounded for John Hadl's passes while Ron Mix blocked, where Al Davis and Chuck Noll were assistant coaches on the Chargers' staff.

And it's where the stadium - expanded to 73,500 seats for Sunday's game - is named for Jack Murphy, the late sports columnist who persuaded Barron Hilton, the hotel czar and the Chargers' original owner, to transfer the team that Los Angeles ignored in 1960.

''They'll have 73,500 people at the Super Bowl paying $100 a ticket,'' Gillman said with a laugh. ''We had trouble getting anybody to pay $2 a ticket.''

When the Chargers thrived, Davis, now the managing general genius of the Los Angeles Raiders, found it easier to tell his favorite after-dinner story.

''It's about the guy,'' Davis likes to say, ''who walked up to Nicky Hilton and said, 'I hear you made a million dollars with a baseball franchise.' But Nicky said, 'It wasn't me, it was my brother Barron. And it wasn't a baseball franchise, it was a professional football franchise. And he didn't make a million dollars, he lost it.''

Reminded of that story now, Barron Hilton smiles and says, ''We lost about $900,000 our only year in Los Angeles.'' But that financial flop during the A.F.L.'s first season enabled Jack Murphy, a gentle pipe smoker who was the San Diego Union sports columnist, to persuade Hilton to move the team to San Diego for the 1961 season.

''Without Jack Murphy, I never would've moved the franchise,'' Hilton said. ''Jack was very perceptive in foreseeing that San Diego was a major-league city, that a pro football franchise would succeed there.''

At the time San Diego was known as a Pacific Coast League stop where Ted Williams had learned to hit a curveball. But the Chargers quickly established a pro football identity. Including their Western Division title in 1960, when all 8,000 spectators once were ushered to the same side of the Los Angeles Coliseum to impress television viewers, the Chargers won five divisional titles in six years as well as the 1963 A.F.L. championship with a 51-10 rout of the Boston Patriots.

''Sid Gillman,'' said Davis, ''was the father of modern-day passing. Passing was thought of as vertical, the length of the field, but Sid also thought of it as horizontal. Sid used the width of the field.''

Gillman hired Davis as the Chargers' pass-receivers coach from the Southern Cal staff. He hired Noll, who had been one of Paul Brown's messenger guards with the Cleveland Browns, as a defensive coach.

''Anytime I spoke at a clinic, Al was sitting in the front row, then he'd always come up and talk to me later. Chuck called me; he wanted to be a coach, and I figured anybody who could run in plays for Paul Brown had to be bright. And he really wanted the job, he was persistent.

''Look at what those two went on to accomplish. Between them, they've helped put together seven Super Bowl winners. Chuck coached four Steeler teams. Al put together three Raider teams. Nobody else has more than two Super Bowl winners.''

Gillman, along with Alworth and Mix, are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But the Chargers of those early years also had Hadl at quarterback, Keith Lincoln and Paul Lowe at running back, Walt Sweeney at guard, and Earl Faison and Ernie Ladd on the defensive line.

''When the upper deck was added to Balboa Stadium before the 1961 season,'' recalls Paul McGuire, the NBC commentator who was a linebacker and punter on that team, ''about a dozen of us players were out there working on the construction. Digging and sweating.''

Despite the Charger success, an upper deck wasn't enough to attract big crowds to a concrete-seat stadium that had been built during World War I. Some A.F.L. people were hoping that Barron Hilton would return the franchise to Los Angeles, but Murphy stirred support in 1965 for a $27 million bond issue to finance a new stadium. The referendum passed with a 73 percent vote.

''That's what turned the town on,'' Gillman recalls. ''That's what kept pro football in San Diego.''

The new stadium also created the San Diego Padres as a 1969 major-league expansion franchise. But in 1966 Barron Hilton sold control of the Chargers to Gene Klein for $10 million, then a record price for a pro football franchise. And in 1984, a few months before Klein sold his majority interest to Alex Spanos, he persuaded the other National Football League owners to select San Diego as the site of Super Bowl XXII.

At that meeting, the owners first voted Pasadena, Calif., as the Super Bowl XXI site. So the San Diego group, led by Herb Klein, the editor of the Copley Newspapers who had once been President Nixon's press secretary, and Gene Parma, a beer distributor, doubted that the owners would choose another southern California city. But after a seven-vote deadlock with Miami, the owners chose San Diego.

''I sold San Diego,'' Klein said later, ''the way I once sold used cars, reminding the owners that San Diego had supported the N.F.L. through both good teams and bad teams.''

And now Super Bowl XXII will be played where Jack Murphy not only believed that pro football belonged but where he also built the stadium, in a sense, column by column.